Deeplinks Blog posts about Patents

In 1998, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued Patent 5,718,632, on a method for avoiding “unnecessary wastage of time” in video games. What’s transpired in the 17 years since then can best be described as an unnecessary wastage of time.

Namco’s patent covers “auxiliary games” that a player can enjoy while the main game is loading. The patent expired on November 27, which has generated a lot of excitement in the gaming world, and even inspired a Loading Screen Jam where developers create their own loading screen games.

The Trolls’ Favorite Template Has Been Retired, but Don’t Get Too Excited

It’s easy to file a patent complaint. All a patent owner has to do is say that they own a patent and that the defendant infringed it. The patent holder doesn’t even need to identify which product of the defendant’s they believe infringes the patent, or specify which claims of the patent they’re asserting. It’s an absurdly simple process, and unscrupulous patent tolls routinely take advantage of that fact.

Plenty of businesses rely on third-party payers: parents often pay for college; insurance companies pay most health care bills. Reaching out to potential third-party payers is hardly a new or revolutionary business practice. But someone should tell the Patent Office. Earlier this year, it issued US Patent No. 9,026,468 to Securus Technologies, a company that provides telephone services to prisoners. The patent covers a method of “proactively establishing a third-party payment account.” In other words, Securus patented the idea of finding someone to pay a bill.

Today, in a strong opinion from the Federal Circuit, an attempt for rightsholders to use an obscure trade court to block the “importation” of digital data was rejected. The Federal Circuit held that a court that has the ability to block “articles that infringe” does not have the ability to block digital data.

We’ve long been concerned about “patent trolls”—companies that don’t produce anything themselves but buy patents, then make their money by threatening and even suing companies that are producing products. But today we’re going to discuss a different kind of trolling: running fishing lures through the water. That’s because this October’s Stupid Patent of the Month, US Patent No. 7,113,449, involves putting data about trolling—the fishing kind—on a computer.